Marxism vs. National Socialism: Lenin, Hitler, Mao Compared

Introduction: Revolutionary Promises and Authoritarian Outcomes

Lenin's version of socialism, which became the model for the Soviet Union, China, Cuba, and other underdeveloped nations that underwent revolutions in the twentieth century, was highly centralized, hierarchical, and authoritarian. It emphasized rapid industrialization and economic development under the direction of the Communist Party, although in all these semi-feudal societies this was carried out without the benefits of any type of liberal or democratic traditions. Lenin was a tyrant and mass murderer whose authoritarian — or totalitarian — system became the model for other tyrants like Stalin, Hitler, and Mao. Contrary to the original hopes of Karl Marx and even Lenin, no socialist revolution occurred in Germany, France, or any Western nation, all of which remained dominated by governments hostile to the Soviet Union and Communism in general.

Although Hitler led a National Socialist "revolution" in Germany in 1933, this ideology was hostile to Marxism, Communism, democratic socialism, and liberalism, and was in fact heavily based on racist, anti-Semitic, and Social Darwinist ideas. In 1941, it launched an all-out war of extermination against Russia and Communism, which the Soviet Union barely survived. Hitler's Germanic empire was defeated in 1945, while Britain, France, and the other colonial empires were left bankrupt. In the colonial and semi-colonial world, Communist, socialist, and nationalist movements came to power — often supported by the Soviet Union and opposed by the United States — but these also encountered similar problems in attempting to build socialist societies on very underdeveloped economic and social foundations. All of these revolutions were responsible for millions of deaths; in the cases of the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany, and Mao's China, the toll reached tens of millions. Any "successes" or "strengths" they might have had were far outweighed by the sheer number of deaths they caused, inflicted both on their own people and on others who fell under their control.

Lenin's Soviet Model: Centralization, Terror, and State Socialism

Lenin and his Communist successors in many countries certainly promised the common people peace, land, and bread, but ended up producing poverty, war, and death on a mass scale. In the socialist states founded by Lenin, Stalin, and Mao, poor peasants and the working class were favored in educational and training opportunities, although specialists, officers, and technicians from the old regime were retained temporarily until more trustworthy replacements could be trained. Lenin also insisted on the immediate transition to socialism in Russia as soon as the Bolsheviks took power in 1917, but also argued that "only those enterprises ought to be nationalized which were already run on large-scale capitalist lines" (Service 351). He regarded the authoritarian war economy as the best model for socialism in the Soviet Union and regarded the state as "an engine of coordination and indoctrination" (Service 353). Socialism was first and foremost "account-keeping and supervision" in a centrally planned economy that required high "standards of literacy, numeracy and punctuality" (Service 353).

Lenin and his successors were quite willing to use state terror against class enemies, counter-revolutionaries, or even peasants and petty traders who withheld grain and other supplies from the Communist authorities. Indeed, police-state terror became a common feature in all Marxist states that copied the Soviet model — or had it imposed on them from without. Out of necessity, the Russian Bolsheviks retreated from state socialism temporarily in the New Economic Policy of the 1920s and permitted free trade in grain and small-scale capitalist enterprises, but this was abolished in 1928 when Stalin proclaimed the collectivization of agriculture and the first Five-Year Plan.

Most Western socialists remained liberal and democratic in their ideology, and before 1917 their common assumption had been that socialism actually meant an expansion of political, economic, and industrial democracy. They doubted that Lenin, "the eulogist for dictatorship, was properly categorized as a socialist," as did his Menshevik, social democratic, and Socialist Revolutionary opponents during the civil war of 1918–22 (Service 354). Western liberals and conservatives were eager to identify all forms of socialism with the Leninist-Stalinist police state and the "political, social and economic oppression" of the Soviet Union (Service 358).

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